Category: Six on the Wild Die

The Star Wars universe, despite originally depicting a very Manichean struggle between good and evil, has become in the decades since the original movie a very morally nuanced place. I’ve mentioned before that if I look at the current status of the franchise, I’m tempted to consider Star Wars to be more of an anti-war story than a war one, but that’s a debate that we’ve had on this website very recently. Personally, I feel that although the original trilogy no doubt romanticized armed insurgency, George Lucas’s point of view on war and violence had evolved and become considerably more pacifist by the time the prequels and The Clone Wars rolled in.

Behind the curtain of space fantasy, George Lucas told the audience about things like false flag operations, the military-industrial complex, and factionalism in insurgencies. The heroes of the story, the Jedi, lose because they get involved in war. War itself is bad. If we look at the totality of the material that Lucas himself produced under the banner of Star Wars, behind all of the heroics and the swashbuckling, it sure appears to tell us that war sucks. But is there a way to add a bit more nuance to this message without negating it? Read More

Canon and continuity seem to be an excessively important issue for a big chunk of the hardcore Star Wars fandom. It’s been almost two years since the Star Wars continuity was rebooted and trimmed down, and the continuity wars (well, to be honest, the continuity playground arguments) don’t seem to be going to die anytime soon. The current official position appears to be a more informal approach to continuity, one less bogged in minutiae and more interested in storytelling opportunities, something that we have argued for from this website. And still, for all the disturbing behavior of a very vocal sector of the Bring Back Legends crew and for how tempting it is to point and laugh at them, we can’t ignore that that anal, exhaustive, all-encompassing approach to continuity that they seem to prefer was for a long time the official stance.

Yes, the sweet lie of a water-tight Star Wars continuity was a lie fed by Lucasfilm and its affiliates, sometimes quite aggressively. This tedious, mind-numbing, encyclopedic approach to what should be a fantastic universe full of magic and mystery was fed by hundreds of guides and technical specifications and was sponsored by just as many novels and comics, whose only purpose was to patch a completely unwieldy continuity that had grown without control or direction. Let’s not forget that all these works were official ones, that the G-canon, C-canon, WTF-canon nonsense came from Lucasfilm employees. That’s why it’s necessary to look at the times the old EU seemed to shun that approach, as a way to perhaps learn how to avoid these pitfalls in the futures. And one of the best examples of this is, without any doubt, the defunct HoloNet News, the website Lucasfilm released to promote Attack of the Clones. The website decided to smooth over continuity using two weapons: humor and a knowing wink.

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